Elitetrack: Sport Training & Conditioning

All,
I have been reading lately about barefoot running and some pros and cons of the practice. I’m interested to see what this community’s thoughts are on the subject. Most of the reading I’ve found has been “pro-barefoot” and the few negative factors I’ve read are on protecting the feet from objects. All of the reading suggests that athletes gradually move into the practice of barefoot running with a simple short to long model. My idea would be to work up to include this as part of the warmup routine of my athletes up to doing a few accelerations barefoot.

Personally, I have decided to give it a try by starting on a treadmill for about 20 minutes at a slow pace. I was surprised by the amount of calf soreness I had the next day because the same workout with shoes has no effect on my calf muscles. One thing I noticed was that without shoes was that I could completely control how my foot landed with a little thought. If I wanted to land on the outside of my foot, it was easy to do, if I wanted to land on the inside, okay, and if I wanted to land right in the middle of my foot, I could do that too. The same happened when I thought about my pushoff. This is coming from a runner who has always had pronation problems and terrible shin splints (even from just walking around). My shins felt no worse after this exercise.

A couple questions to spur some discussion:
1) Have any of you tried barefoot in your training?
2) Have any of you ran into problems with barefoot running?
3) What are your recommendations on incorporating this into a training routine?
4) What sorts of surfaces?
5) Do the Vibram Five Fingers shoes work well?

Some references:
http://www.quickswood.com/my_weblog/2006/08/athletic_footwe.html
http://tullyrunners.com/Articles/RaucciArticle.htm
http://sportsci.org/jour/0103/mw.htm

Thanks,
Cody Vandermyn

Cody,

You bring up a great subject!

One week ago on a nice sunny day I had my athletes do their warm down without shoes. I was amazed at what I saw! The typical heel strikers were landing on the balls of their feet with every stride! In fact, I was in awe! I am also interested in hearing what others have to say.

Jed

I hate shoes.  Barefoot training is great.  Just make sure you have a good surface (turf or great grass).  If you cut your foot, you’re screwed.

Five Finger shoes?  I imagine they’re about as useful as your girlfriend thinking that she can get naked by wearing a flesh colored swimsuit.  You’re either bare or you’re not.  Accept no imitations.

We do a lot of barefoot activities in the fall, but it is hard to work it in as the season gets under way. The majority of the barefoot running was done on tempo days and during cool downs.

The problem with shoes is that they start wear on your problem areas and perpetuate the problem.

I myself limit barefoot running (or Free’s in my case) to warm up and/or cool down.  Even in normal shoes I find my feet get beat up every once in a while (particularly metatarsals).

I use barefoot running or some other foot strengthening activity practically every day of the week. We rarely do anything over a jog barefoot and most of the time the work comes in the form of general strength work (often indirectly trained) or as a cooldown activity (which might involve either running, jumping, jogging or general strength locomotive exercises performed barefoot).

I experimented with doing tempo and even some acceleration work barefoot and I didn’t like the results. The athletes got arch problems and lots of soreness in the achilles. This may have been slightly due to the fact that we did too much too soon but I think it was also due to the fact that it’s difficult to completely undo a lifetime of dependency (in the lower leg and foot musculature, tendons, ligaments, and bones) on shoes in a reasonable amount of time.

I am coaching in a small town in New Zealand and kids down here spend a lot of time barefoot.  In PE classes none of the kids wear shoes (which leads to some exciting times in floor hockey), because they would have to carry them around all day...we don’t do lockers over here.  I actually had a kid jump 1.90 off the gym floor barefoot a few years ago.  He refused to put shoes on.

We have a grass track , which is the town’s main Rugby field in the winter, so we train on the town’s cricket ground in the winter and it is a lovely patch of grass.  Throughout the winter it is nice and soft and sometimes even a bit squishy!  We do a lot of our work barefoot and we never have any problems.

We also do most of our bounding and plyometrics barefoot on gym mats (about 2in thick.  We do all of our coordination drills barefoot as well and they are done on the mats too.

When I coached in the States we used to have the kids finish their training with five or six barefoot 100yd stride out on the football field as this seemed to help reduce the incidence of shin splints.  And they loved running in the mud in March!

I read somewhere a few years ago that if all of us wimps would take the time to condition ourselves to running barefoot, that that is actually the best way to run.  But that was obviously one side of the argument.  I know none of my athletes get stressed if they forget their shoes for training...they just go barefoot.

I hope that helps.

So would lifting in Nike Frees be good then?

I have 4 of my athletes in Nike Frees right now and they love them (as you would think considering how much they do barefoot).  I am thinking about recommending to all of them to have a look at them when they next need training shoes.  My son is a triple jumper/sprinter and has asked for a new pair of frees (x trainers) for his birthday this week. I do have some distance runners in the group who are young 13-15, so I would love to hear from anyone who has had distance runners in those shoes.  We do almost no running on roads if that matters.